What if Earth was the only planet in the Solar System?

by Carson
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Stunning view of lonely sand dunes under amazing evening sunset sky

In the sky, we can see 5 planets with your naked eye. But what if they all vanished? Well, the effects would be much worse than just losing targets of explorations.

The balance of planets

There was a similar topic of What If A Planet Disappeared In The Solar System. But we’re not talking about they spontaneously vanishing, but they had never existed at all. First of all, if there were no gas giants, that means all the gas that formed a large structure are all going to the star. Sun would be more massive if the mass of the Solar System didn’t change. But that’s fine, that’s no big deal. Well, a larger Sun is the least of your worries. There are a lot to come here.

First, we need to understand the balance of the planets. Each of them’s orbit don’t overlap, and keeping a stable one via gravity. That doesn’t sound massive, but if a planet vanished, there would be side effects way earlier than the alter of the orbits.

A huge, uninhabitable planet

If Mercury, Venus and Mars didn’t exist, Earth may become a super-Earth. They are almost the same mass as Earth, meaning that if the debris became together, the planet would have 2 Earth masses.

Then, remember the Grand Tack Hypothesis? Well, if it’s true, we’d also facing a number of issues without Jupiter. First of all, it has eaten a lot of rocky material. If they all got released, they would form a planet…… maybe twice as wide as Earth and 8 times as massive, similar to Kepler-22b. Also, without the Grand Tack, the planet might be in the position of Mars, being too cold for life, or just right because a thicker atmosphere.

Well, seems like Kepler-22b is missing one or two gas giants to create a Grand Tack. Maybe we can hope our new interstellar home will have a gas giant in its vicinity, but not too close. It is just too large to live on, just like Earth in the hypothetical world.

Kepler-22b, which might be habitable if it had a gas giant in its neighborhood
Image Source: NASA’s Eyes

Asteroids

These are already hostile environments to live, but there is one more threat — Asteroids. Although the planet would be huge, there are still a lot of leftovers. These are apparent threats to any planet that might be thriving with life. If that happened and life somehow evolved, there are millions of asteroids that are trying to kill them. Although a lot would be locked in resonances by its strong gravitational pull, they can escape it easily when they get too close to Sun.

At that planet, collisions would be more frequent that on Earth, at least a bit more. Asteroids’ orbits would be switching to and fro and they are hard to detect since they are so chaotic. Also, if that happened, it was missing a gas giant to protect it from danger.

Luckily, in the Solar System, there is Jupiter to save the day. It gets hit by hundreds of asteroids every day. That is a sign that it behaves like a planet: Either pulling it into orbit, crashing into it or flying the asteroid into space. Although there is a rare chance that it would fly directly to Earth, we still have to thank Jupiter for most of the cases it had prevented. That’s a similar case when Earth was a moon of Jupiter because it was on the front line.

Jupiter -- the gigantic planet
Jupiter, which protected Earth from millions of asteroids
Image Source: NASA’s Eyes

Also, accelerating asteroids might be a good thing. Although they have a chance to hit a planet, it is smaller than you think. The time elapsed to pass through the system is shorter and space is really vast. If they passed close to a planet, they might reach a velocity just enough to be unharmed.

So, when you look up and see the planets, no matter how weird they are, do not think it is better for them to cease to exist. Also, losing a planet is not a happy thing because all that money spent on the projects would be all wasted.

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